The prospect for psychiatric research in Britain is bleak. The U.K. government reduced its funding of British Universities by about 10 % between 1980 and 1983 and is now imposing further reductions of about 2 % a year for the foreseeable future. Funding of the Research Councils is also being reduced at a similar rate. As a result many academic and technical posts in our medical schools have already been lost or “frozen” and many more seem destined to disappear before the end of the decade. Although charitable bodies like the Wellcome Foundation are attempting to provide additional funds to offset the damage serious harm is being done to British medical research, and to British science in general.

Psychiatric research suffers along with everything else. For the past generation our strength and our most important achievements have been in social psychiatry. Very few departments have the laboratories or the expertise to mount fundamental biological research and in the present financial climate they have little hope of acquiring this capacity. The Medical Research Council spends its shrinking funds as wisely as it can and there is still a great deal of expertise in our university departments and MRC units, but our capacity to compete with the United States is waning fast. We will do our best to continue to do research which is well designed, innovative and useful. But unless our financial predicament changes we will be responsible for a decreasing proportion of the most important and influential studies, particularly in the biological sphere in which the major developments of the next decade are likely to come.